Feedback Beggars
FFA is not the only fannish forum that's obsessed with feedback on fanfic. Various BNFs and MNFs have complained on their Tumblrs that they are not getting the reams of kudos and comments they so obviously are entitled to. This is in spite of the fact that their kudos counts frequently number in the thousands and their comments run on for multiple pages. Bettydays Meme’s go-to example of a feedback beggar is Bettydays (“betts” on AO3). Once upon a time, she was just another batshit, obsessed Destiel shipper who at “some time [during 2014] turned bitter and now hates [Supernatural] and writes long screeds about how everything it does is queerbaiting and shippers are oppressed just like the civil rights movement, you guys.” She then became a Migratory Slash Fan, moving into Stucky fandom, to the despair of MCU nonnies. Her Stucky fic, especially "Venus in Vibranium," has been mocked on FFA numerous times; so has her more-recent Kylux modern AU and her Credence/Graves fic. Betty is also disliked for her tiresome "writing fic for great!! justice!!!" mentality, her self-image as super-kinky and transgressive when in fact her work is "really....vanilla," and her seeing nothing wrong with having watched Colin Farrell's sex tape and announced it to fandom. Nonnies who've wanked about Betty have been accused of having a hateboner. Still, even before she became meme-notorious she was being mentioned for "throwing a fit" when the Tumblr reviews she'd been angling for weren't 100% positive, and for complaining about losing "something like three whole subscribers on her latest terrible opus." She also “threatened to quit writing [ViV …] for a couple of months (years in fandom time) because she got that comment on it from someone into D/s who made some very polite criticisms of the story. Sadly, enough people sucked up to her on Tumblr she finished the thing.” In July 2015 she posted "An Open Letter to Fanfic Readers," which meme discussed on DW Posts #247 and especially #248. In short, readers should never leave any kind of comment that might upset Betty, which would be anything except gushing praise. This mini-wank covered Betty's less-than-spectacular writing abilities, massive secondhand embarrassment over a fic written by a friend of Betty's in which Betty dommed Dean and Castiel, eye rolling at Betty's follow-up posts, musings on whether there is "a direct correlation between people who approach fandom like it's activism per se and people whose fanworks are laughably terrible," and the appearance of a wild Aja. In August she followed up with "Some ideas for leaving good AO3 feedback," which nonnies didn't find bad overall, other that she was taking the matter way too seriously. There was more snark of her writing, including one nonny looking at her fic tag on Tumblr and opining, "Well, I can see why she's not into concrit!" Betty’s breakthrough as a major fandom wanker came in late April 2016, with a now-deleted post about how she was trying a new “social experiment”: Ko-Fi, which lets you embed a button on your site so that people who like your work can PayPal you U.S. $3, thereby "buying you a coffee." i’ve been wanting to start a trend of fanfic tipping for a long time, because sometimes i read a fic and i just wanna buy the author a coffee, yk? a kudos, a comment, a bookmark, and my unrelenting adoration just doesn’t seem enough. so anyway, if you’ve ever enjoyed one or more of my fics and want to buy me a coffee, now you can! and i encourage everyone to set up their own too so we can all transform this glorious fandom economy into something where Treat Yo Self can be literal. Between Betty’s self-absorption... That is bettydays in a nutshell. "We should all try to be nice to fic writers! So EVERYONE SHOULD LEAVE ME GLOWING COMMENTS." ... and FFA’s general reaction to monetizing fanfic, this did not go down well. There was, as there usually is in such discussions, a long subthread about precisely why such monetization is bad. This continued on the next post. The latter discussion involved this astute observation: "We have enough drama, wank, and general unpleasantness now. We need to add actual money into the mix and make it exponentially worse???? ", as well as an attempt to make nonnies objecting to fic-for-pay out to be ableists. Somehow, Betty found out that FFA was talking about her, which led to days and days of self-pitying on her Tumblr, her putting her Tumblr on a "hiatus" that lasted about six hours, and her BFFs huffing and puffing from her BFFs about how awful we are. One of them came to play in a dead post, accusing us of "cyberbullying," asserting, "I could have a lot of fun bouncing your IP addresses," and calling us a "pile of dirt swilling cum muffling shit for brains." This was responsible for much amusement a few posts later. Before that, however, meme was entertained by Betty stan Shiphitsthefan, who fumed that FFA would "dare ... hurt milady Betts," announced that they were "five foot and full of rage," and informed us that '"'I have a very specific set of skills, and those include." Which immediately became meme's latest running joke (and prompted a Navy SEALS parody). Nonnies were also struck by Ship's hypocrisy about anonymity, their own white knight, and their, er, way with words. Other brave defenders of Milady Betts included swingandswirl, who didn't seem to get the concept of an anonmeme; kat2107, who inadvertently implied that if we don't pony up for fanfic writers they'll stop writing; paintmeahero, who unironically said, "Many of them seem to be angry that you’re a better writer than they are"; and fraxinus ("Ah, look at them, nobly asking for money to be given to them for fanworks"). Nonny: "Good god, no wonder these people think BD is such a great writer. Can any one of them even string a decent sentence together?" Betty continued to wank throughout the merry month of May: * On the 11th, she put up a now-deleted post titled "On fanfic and entitlement" quoted extensively here; she earnestly compared not leaving feedback to not tipping waiters, cutting someone off in traffic, and other violations of "the baseline social schema." As one nonny observed, Betty tends to conflate "fandom social schemas and unspoken etiquette" with "what Betty wants." * A day later, Betts was moaning that FFA created "a 6300-post thread devoted to personally roasting me" for her Ko-Fi idea. Meme noticed, not for the first time, how little Betty the Self-Anointed Fandom Expert actually knows about fandom. It was also noted how, if you sent her a polite ask pointing out her factual errors (e.g., that AO3 is the only fic archive that matters), "she will not publish that ask, but will instead refer to it as ‘an anonymous toddler tantrum in my askbox.’” (The same Betty post, also now deleted, contained sentences such as "sometimes i post wild speculation on the internet just to get a discussion going on the topic.” and "i like discussion. i like being proven wrong.”) * On May 19, she tweeted that "In light of recent events, a friend mailed me a copy of So You've Been Publicly Shamed by @jonronson and it's been immeasurably helpful. <3" The FFA thread about this included excerpts of her Betty/Dean/Cas fic with Dean and Cas's names replaced with Bert and Ernie's; covered Betty's hatred and bashing of Leia Organa; noted that she'd revived her "wank economy" tag; and quoted her as saying, "i’ve been thinking a lot about fandom economy and (despite the accusations that i don’t know anything about money, which, wow) how similar it is to the finance industry." Nonny: "This sentence needs to be put in the MOMA." Category:Fandom wanks and wankers